Spoken Soul Festival

MISSION

The mission of the Spoken Soul Festival, a three-day event, is to produce an annual festival that will help advance the careers of a variety of women artists including poets, fine artists, photographers, filmmakers, and designers. The festival gives talented female performing artists and craftswomen from South Florida a free venue to showcase their talents. We provide three months of free publicity by featuring them in our festival publicity campaign. We hold workshops for at-risk youth and women to learn about careers in the arts and create their own work. We provide networking opportunities at our brunch and throughout the festival. In addition to the events, thanks to a special grant from WomenArts, our website provides a promotional and informational forum for women artists and the arts community as a whole. The SSF website features Spoken Soul TV, Spoken Soul Radio, FREE event listings for events by women, for women or about women, year round digital features for our alumni artists and stronger visibility as well as content provider for our community partners and sponsors.

HISTORY

The Spoken Soul Festival began as an effort to support the first annual SWAN/Support Women Artists Now Day by a group of South Florida’s multi-cultural women artists and  art community leaders. It was inspired by a call for support by WITASWAN (Women in  the Audiences Supporting Women Artists Now) and WomenArts, a non-profit arts  service organization dedicated to helping women artists. In the first four years of  Support Women Artists Now Day/SWAN Day, there have been over 700 SWAN events  in 21 countries around the world. WomenArts has recognized SWAN Day Miami as one  of the top five SWAN events worldwide because the festival is one of the largest SWAN  events and one of the most effective in training and supporting the participating women  artists. Since its launch in March 2008, the festival has been awarded proclamations  from the City of Miami Beach, Miami Dade County and the City of Miami as well as a City Of Miami special City Seal. Featured artists have been commissioned or featured  for shows during Art Basel – Miami, Gibson Guitar Showroom, New York Fashion Week,  and Gen Art’s Fresh Faces Miami.

DESCRIPTION

Spoken Soul Festival features three events: SWAN Community Program, SWAN  Spoken Soul Showcase – SWAN DAY, and Vanessa Baez Memorial Women’s Brunch. SWAN Community Program gives the production team, sponsors and featured artists an opportunity to give back to our community by showing young girls and women empowerment through the arts.

SWAN Spoken Soul Showcase is the celebration of SWAN Day. The goal of this artistic  showcase is to help transition novice artists to a career as a successful artist.  Vanessa Baez Memorial Women’s Brunch celebrates everyday women with extraordinary courage. The brunch provides an opportunity for women to celebrate the life of Vanessa Baez while networking and fostering creativity through the sharing of performance art or stories by inspirational guest artists or speakers from the local community.